I am an emergency medicine physician married to a trauma surgeon and two little people call me “Mom.” I started this blog with the dream of publishing a novel – please come along for the ride by “liking” this page on Facebook.

Longer version:

In 2002, I met my husband in a seedy bar in my hometown (cue Bruce Springsteen).

Our meeting defied the odds because Fremont is so tucked away in rural Michigan that meeting a handsome, eligible, feminist, future trauma surgeon in a dive-bar there was about as likely as “The Boss” showing up to sing background music for this bio. We fell in love hard and fast and were married less than two years later.

In 2009, we left the land of 8-months of snow and slush for the land of honky tonks (Nashville). I started training in obstetrics & gynecology, but switched to emergency medicine after just a year. Hardest decision ever.

We added Kharis…and then Kai to our family (yes, I had two babies during residency!).

AND THEN (finally) – after 10 years of marriage with with one/both of us in med school/residency – we were both DONE.

In July of 2013, we left the hills of Tennessee behind us and moved to Savannah, Georgia. I had developed a crush on the South watching movies like Steel Magnolias, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, and Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil. And in the weeks and months after moving here, I sometimes felt like I was in a movie – eyes wide as a neighbor walked her little dogs in her golf cart and we attended a home dinner party with servers in white gloves. (See “10 Truths about Life in the South.”)

Our little neighborhood boasts one-lane roads framed by moss draped oaks. It hosts its own Fourth of July “processional” with golf carts and bikes decked out in red, white and blue. There are summer “flotillas” (jumping in downstream and floating in with the tide to a dock party). And every Halloween, all of the trick-or-treaters ride a hay-wagon house-to-house. This is Kharis – wearing twinkle wings – our first Halloween here…

It all felt dusted with fairy dust until we went through what I call, “Our Church Break-up.” It was a hard time and I needed some serious “blog therapy” (see parts I-III). I started this website in February 2015, and committed to an average of a post a week for a year. In a matter of months, I had multiple pieces published on KevinMD.com and >250,000 page views. A year (and fifty-two posts) later, I was a better, thicker-skinned writer.

The truth is, I have always wanted to write fiction and I finally stopped dreaming about it and started “filling in the boxes,” (see 5 Pieces of Advice That Changed my Life). I “finished” my first novel, THE WONDERS WROUGHT, in the summer of 2017. It’s a dual-narrative featuring a grandmother’s coming of age story in 1950’s Savannah, and her granddaughter’s subsequent modern-day awakening to racism in America. I think it will be enjoyed by readers who liked THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES and SMALL GREAT THINGS.

I have mapped a course to traditional publication and hope you’ll see The Wonders Wrought on a shelf in your local bookstore in 2019. Keep up on this journey by “liking” my writer page on Facebook. (Please do…Each new like is a little piece of good news!) And I’ll keep blogging when inspiration strikes because “writing and relating are good medicine.”